Of course you would not be speaking fluently were you to pause to assess these questions as you were speaking. Yet the ideas should be in the back of your mind before you begin to speak and while you are conversing.
Now many linguistics and EFL teachers agree on that students learn to speak in the second language by “interacting”.
Communicative language teaching and collaborative learning serve best for this aim. Communicative language teaching is based on real-life situations that require communication.
By using this method in EFL classes, students will have the opportunity of communicating with each other in the target language. In brief, EFL teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can occur when students collaborate in groups to achieve a goal or to complete a task.
conversation, for example, the perposes may be to make social contact with people, to establish rapport, or to engage in the harmless chitchat that occupies much of the time they spend with friends. In some situations, speakers use speaking to give instructions, to describe things, to entertain people, other speaking purposes. Richards and Renandya (2002:201) further argued that each of these different purposes for speaking implies knowledge of the rules that account for how spoken language reflects the context or situation in which speech occurs, the participants involved and their specific roles and relationships, and the kind of activity the speakers are involved in.
Brown (2007) suggests that EFL teachers should teach students to speak English by enabling them to perform the
‘microskills’ and ‘macroskills’ communication. The microskills regarding to the smaller elements of language (phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units). The microskills is elaborated in the follow aspects:
1. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
2. Orally produce differences among the English phonemes and allophonic variants.
3. Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonational contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) in order to accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Monitor your own oral production and use various strategies device–pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking–to enhance the clarity of the message.
8. Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralizations), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Produce speech in natural constituents–in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath groups, and sentences.
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.71
While macroskills acquaint speakers with larger elements of language related to cohesion, function, fluency, styles, nonverbal communication, and strategies option. And these are further expressed in the six aspects as follow:
1. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
2. Accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
3. Use appropriate register, implicature, pragmatic conventions, and other sociolinguistic features in face to face conversations.
4. Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
5. Use facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language to convey meanings.
6. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as empasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor in understanding you.72
71 H. Douglas Brown. 2007. Teaching by Principle: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. San Fransisco, Longman: 328.
In the communicative model of language teaching, teachers help the students develop the content of knowledge by providing authentic practice that prepares students for real life communication situations. They help their students develop the ability to produce micro- and macroskills in speaking English that are appropriate to specific contexts in real life situations.
The main purpose of teaching speaking to EFL learners is to improve students’ spoken communication skill, so they are able to express themselves using the target language appropriately based on the context which they need. Enabling students to perform the skills, teachers should apply various kinds of appropriate approaches, methods, and techniques in teaching and learning speaking.
One of the approaches in teaching foreign language is communicative approach (CA) which is also called communicative language teaching (CLT). CA is an approach to language teaching which emphasizes that the goal of language learning is communicative competence. A major stand of CLT centres around the essential belief that if students are involved in meaning focused communicative tasks, then language learning will take care of itself, and that plentiful exposure to language in use and plenty of opportunities to use it are vitally important for a students’ development of knowledge and skill,73 (Harmer, 2007). The CLT is inspired by the assumption that language is basically as a means of communication.
Communicative language teaching has basically characterictics that make different from other approaches. One of the most characteristic features of communicative language teaching is that it pays systematic attention to functional as well
73 Jeremy Harmer. 2007. The Practice of English Language Teaching. China, Pearson Longman: 69.
as structural aspects of language (Littlewood, 1982:1). Brown (2007) mentioned seven characteristics of communicative language teaching as follows.
1. Overall goals. CLT suggests a focus on all of the components (grammatical, discourse, functional, sociolinguistic, and strategic) of communicative competence.
2. Relationship of form and function. Language techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional, use of language for meaningful purposes.
3. Fluency and accuracy. A focus on students “flow” of comprehension and production and a focus on the formal accuracy of production are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques.
4. Focus on real-world contexts. Students in communicative class ultimately have to use the language, productively and reveptively, in unrehearsed contexts outside the classroom.
5. Autonomy and strategic involvement. Students are given opportunities to focus on their own learning process through raising their awareness of their own styles of learning (strengths, weaknesses, preferences) and through the development of appropriate strategies for production and comprehension.
6. Teacher roles. The role of the teacher is that of facilitator and guide, not an all-knowing font of knowledge.
7. Students roles. Students in a CLT class are active participants in their own learning process. Learner- centered, cooperative, collaborative learning is emphasized, but not at the expense of appropriate
teacher-centered activity.74
These characteristics underscore some major departures of CLT from earlier other methods and approaches. CLT falls in with the changing of teaching to be more focused on the students and to allow them the opportunity to produce the target language in meaningful and authentic situations.
Howatt in Richards and Rodgers (2002:155) distinguishes between a ‘strong’ and a ‘weak’ version of CLT. The weak version which has become more or less standard practice in the last ten years, stresses the importance of providing learners with opportunities to use their English for communicative purposes. The ‘strong’ version of communicative teaching, advances the claim that language is acquired through communication, so it is not merely a question of activating an existing but inert knowledge of the language, but of the stimulating the development of the language system itself. If the former could be described as ‘learning to use’ English, the later entails ‘using English to learn it.’
The concept of the strong version of communicative language teaching is ‘using English to learn it’ is line with Nunan (1991:39) states that to speak in a foreign language will be facilitated when the learners are actively engaged in attempting to communicate. It is like learning to read by reading and learning to speak by speaking. This does not mean that manipulative exercises in which focus of attention on the manipulation of linguistic form should be negleted.
Exercise for speaking should help learners use the language essential to real-life situation.
In briefly, the teaching of speaking requires the teacher to help students acquire the skill of speaking by providing
74 H. Douglas Brown. 2007. Teaching by Principle: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. San Fransisco, Longman: 46-47..
appropriate assignment that shape skills, directing students to perform speaking activities, and providing opportunities to practice. Teachers develop active communicative learning in order to engage students in exploratoryy, invertigative activities, using spoken language to discuss, question, clarify, describe, evaluate, and justify idea. teaching of speaking to EFL studentss need to use many kinds of approaches, methods, and techniques which enable them praticing and using the language to each other. CLT is one of the most popular approach which has great influence to the language teaching and provides the students to use language for communicative purposes, which could finally help them to attain communicative competence as the abilities undelying speaking competence.